Fear And Gloaming: Darkest Dungeon

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Dungeons are horrible places and yet adventurers are usually happy to traipse through them in search of a magical doohickey or demon’s lair. I don’t think I’d feel comfortable spending time with the kind of person who can descend through dark corridors, dripping with the remains of previous visitors, without being at least slightly shaken by the experience. After spending days in the dark, slaughtering horrific creatures, and seeing allies poisoned, impaled on spikes and hacked into pieces, even the most stalwart of barbarians is likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress. Darkest Dungeon seems like an ordinary dungeon crawl but in tracing the mental and emotional scars on its characters, it becomes a far more intriguing proposition. Trailer and details below.

The game should be finished by Autumn 2014 but a crowd-funding campaign may well occur to assist with production. I’m already sold, on the concept at least.

The concept behind Darkest Dungeon is to put the dungeon back in “dungeon crawler.” The environment itself is an antagonist – a scary, haunted place where your chances of survival are slim, hordes of terrifying monsters notwithstanding.

Each and every adventurer you recruit will develop a unique combination of predispositions, proclivities, flaws and strengths – factors that must be carefully considered when forming a party and leading it through horrific environs. Furthermore, how you perfom in the dungeon will have lasting and impactful consequences on their continued development. You are put smack-dab in the role of a squad leader or sports team manager, doing your best to keep the human factors from fracturing your team or destroying their effectiveness.

On top of the Affliction system, which tracks each hero’s stress levels and monitors their psychological status and relationships with one another, the game features perma-death and turn-based tactical combat. Tasty.

In short, we want to create the kind of team interaction and tension that arises in the most desperate situations. We want Hudson’s panic from ‘Aliens’, MacReady’s booze-battling from ‘The Thing’, James’s detached sadism from ‘The Hurt Locker’. We want you to manage a party of human heroes faced with almost insurmountable odds. If you can lead them to victory, you’ll have earned it.

26 Comments

*plug alert* heh this sounds exactly like a “heavy” version of a game I am currently developing for mobile platforms. I’ll actually be announcing it on Friday at 7PM Pacific via livestream at my Twitch (martianarctic) or you can just follow me on twitter. out of deference to RPS not being about mobile, I will not post either of those things although you can get to them through my avatar.

Absolutely intriguing! The header image drew me in with the impressions it had something to do with the simplistic style of my favourite comic artist. And this looks very promising. The mythos, I can almost touch it.

Close to what I love most about setting up dungeons, lovely art style (and a tiny depressed Souls-esque knight on the page), folks whose earlier games I like, music by the bloke who composed for the Prince of Persia games…

Looks interesting. +1 for (probably?) avoiding the “stoic moron law” rpg cliche.Stoic Moron Law. Unless they fail a fear check (if the game even has fear checks) and the gamemaster specifically tells them they’re afraid, most players will assume their characters are fearless and have absolutely no problem doing things like running through a tunnel full of tarantulas or sticking a piece of lit dynamite into a towering, screaming monster made of decaying flesh, twisted metal, and half-consumed victims.

edit: On thinking about it, this isn’t really avoiding the cliche, since the game is telling you about the state of the characters. Oh well. It’s a funny cliche anyway.

While I’d be very surprised if Mignola (of Hellboy fame) wasn’t an influence, I think it’s unfair to call the art a ripoff. There’s far less abstraction than what you generally get from Mignola and, judging by the tentacular monster at the end of the trailer, there’s probably more small details in the larger designs.

Oh man, when the cleric was like, “Don’t worry guys, we got this!” and then SQUIPCH — with the spear? — and everybody starts freaking out? — that was awesome. Hopefully I get to treat this like I treated Faster Than Light, with lots of little stories like how all of my crewmembers were really uncomfortable around my murderous Rockman/Mantis boarding party and didn’t like to be in the same room as them. That kind of stuff will make for awesome mechanics, I hope (not just a second HP bar with voice bubbles). I’m ready to get my emergent play on.

Well that video was five kinds of awesome. If the game itself can provoke similar reactions, then it’s going to be a guaranteed sale. I can’t see myself backing a Kickstarter unless there’s a demo, or otherwise convincing evidence that the mechanics and atmosphere really are there, but I suspect this just might have enough style to succeed regardless. Good luck in any case! (’cause I want this to turn out well :)

It looks like monsters den meets below (with a bit of zafehouse diaries?).
The affliction system seems cool. I like that things like the loss of light/dimming of torch will cause actual repercussions on how characters perform during game-play, it really humanizes the terror of dungeon crawling.
Hopefully they get it right :) High hopes for this one.